Understanding Cloud Firestore
It's wise to note early on in this section that Google rebranded their previous Cloud Datastore product with a newer major version called Cloud Firestore. However, it is also important to understand the relationship between both as Firestore gives the option of Native mode and Datastore mode, with the latter using the traditional Datastore system's behaviors with the Firestore storage layer, which eliminates some of Datastore's limitations.
Cloud Datastore is a NoSQL database that is built to ease application development. It uses a distributed architecture that is highly scalable, and because it is serverless, we do not have to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Cloud Datastore distributes our data over several machines and uses masterless, synchronous replication over a wide geographical area.
Firestore builds on this but also accelerates the development of mobile, IoT, and web applications. It offers built-in live synchronization...